Page 412 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

VEDIC MYTH8-THE CAPTIVE WATERS 197
the Dawn bringing with her the rays of the morning, and when
Urvashi says that she is gone away and Pururavas calls himself
Vasi~h~ha or the brightest, it is the same Dawn flying away from
the embrace of the rising sun. In short, the Dawn is supposed to
have been everything to the ancient people, and a number of legends
are explained in this way, until at last the monotonous character
of these stories led the learned professor to ask to himself the
question, " Is everything the Dawn ? Is everything the Sun ? "
a question, which he answers by informing us that so far as his
researches were concerned they had led him again and again to
the Dawn and the Sun as the chief burden of the myths of the
Aryan race. Tp.e dawn here referred to is the daily dawn as we
see it in the tropical or the temperate zone, or, in other words, it
is the daily conquest of light over darkness that is here represented
as filling the minds of the ancient bards with such awe and fear
as to give rise to a variety of myths. It may be easily perceived how
this theory will be affected by the discovery that U~has, or the
goddess of the dawn in the ~ig-Veda, does not represent the
evanescent dawn of the tropics, but is really the long continuous.
dawn of the Polar or the Circum-Polar regions. If the Arctic theory
is once established many of these mythological explanations wilt
have to be entirely re-written. But the task cannot be undertaken
in a work which is devoted solely to the examination of the
evidence in support of that theory.
The Storm theory was originally put forward by the Indian
Nairuktas as a supplement to the Dawn theory, in order to account
for myths to which the latter was obviously inapplicable. The
chief legend explained on this theory is that of Indra and V~itra,
and the explanation has been accepted almost without reserve by
all Western scholars. The word lndra is said to be derived from
the same root which yielded indu, that is, the rain drop; and
Vritra is one, who covers or encompasses ( vri, to cover) the waters
of the rain-cloud. The two names being thus explained, everything
else was made to harmonise with the Storm theory by distorting
the phrases, if the same could not be naturally interpreted in
confirmity therewith. Thus when Indra strikes parvata ( i. e. a
mountain ) and delivers the rivers therefrom, the Nairuktas.
understood parvata to be a storm-cloud and the rivers to be the
~treams of rain. Indra's wielding the thunderbolt has been similarly
interpt:eted to mean that he was the god of the thunderstorm, and